Moving over
What it takes
If you liked Tabby's profiles you will recognise connection definitions: the same idea, extended to protocols a terminal cannot host.
You already refuse an ugly terminal
Tabby showed that a terminal can be beautiful without being a toy. Vandle shares the taste and spends the rendering budget on native surfaces, so a remote desktop and a shell can live in the same window.
Credit where it is due
Tabby is open source, genuinely pleasant to look at, plugin-friendly, and one of the few terminals whose settings screen is not an apology.
What changes
Four things you get that you did not have.
- Native rendering rather than a web runtime, which is what lets a remote desktop and a real browser sit in the same window as the shell.
- A file surface and a remote desktop on the same connection list, instead of plugins that have to reinvent the protocol.
- A route on every connection, visible on the session while it runs.
- Connection state you can centralise and encrypt instead of a config file you sync by hand.
Side by side
Tabby and Vandle
| Aspect | Tabby | Vandle |
|---|---|---|
| Runtime | Electron | Native, with an embedded surface per protocol |
| Beyond the shell | Plugins | Modules that bring their own surface type |
| Config | A file you sync yourself | A central store you point at, secrets encrypted |
| Look | Themeable, modern | One deliberate dark theme, module hues throughout |
And the rest of it
Four more protocols came along
Replacing one tool gets you five. Whatever else that machine speaks is already a row on the same record - and every one of them takes the route you assigned.
Web
Real browsing, properly routed
SSH
A terminal that keeps up
SFTP
Two remote panes, no detour
WebDAV
The other half of file transfer
RDP
Desktops on a native surface
Local
Your own machine, in the same list
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